The US-East region will provide cloud services that conform to government security and compliance regulations in data centers that are closer to Washington, D.C.
It’s a move by the cloud provider to offer government-oriented services closer to federal customers. AWS already serves agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs, General Services Administration, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Overall, the region announced today will be AWS’ 20th worldwide. Each region includes a set of availability zones, which are made up of one or more data centers.
The new GovCloud US-East region, which the company expects to be available next year, builds on AWS’ existing GovCloud region on the West Coast, which launched in 2011. Broadening the geographic reach of its data centers is important for AWS’ competition with Microsoft Azure, which already has two government-focused regions available, with another two on the way.
